ABSTRACT
In a tribute to Jaspers you said: Humanity is never acquired in solitude, and never by giving ones work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the venture into the public realm. Because beauty only exists in so far as it appears, it must appear to someone; it requires, as its counterpart, people in the world who can recognize it, remark upon it and tell stories about it. In Arendts stories, one finds this quality most poetically, if tragically in the figure of Benjamin, whose embodiment of this type of principled rejection of utilitarianism was the correlate of his constitutional appreciation of the aesthetic. The strongest example of such dedication is Lessing, whose unmitigated partisanship for the world was expressed most powerfully in his absolute preference for friendship, a preference that trumped even truth or the rules of logic.
